On the Importance of Being Human
by Flis
Summary: AU - What if at the end of season 6, Spike became a human instead of just getting a soul? That was what I thought would happen, anyway, so I'm sharing my version with you all.
1. Default Chapter

Author's Notes: AU so somewhat important: Let me explain. This idea germinated in the back of my head at the end of season 6, with the "cliffhanger" regarding Spike's soul. I didn't think they'd have two souled vampires on the show, so I assumed he would be human in season 7. Turned out they would have two souled vampires on the show. So I dunno. The little idea eventually sprouted into this episode I had playing in my head and I figured I'd finally get it out. So this takes place at the beginning of season 7. Immediatley after Spike gets souled. I also assumed he went to the demon with intention of getting the chip out, not a soul. So now you're all caught up. Read on.  
  
On the Importance of Being Human  
  
It took a moment for Spike to register what had just happened. Trials, fire, searing pain...he got that much. He was splayed out on the bottom of a cave in Africa, staring at the stalagmites (stalactites?) and trying to figure out if he felt different. He did. He definitely did. Just not in the way he expected. But he couldn't concentrate. All he could hear was this loud thumping. Not to mention these weird wheezing type sounds and was it always so friggen hot in this cave?  
  
It was in that moment that Spike realized what was different about him. The thumping. The wheezing. The sweating. He was alive. "What did you do to me?" he asked, half rhetorically.  
  
"What you wanted," the demon replied.  
  
Spike shot up to a sitting position so suddenly that he felt dizzy, the parts inside him roaring their disapproval. Being alive was so noisy. "Don't give me that monkey paw crap. This isn't what I asked for and you bloody well know it!"  
  
"What you ask for and what you want can be two different things."  
  
"God dammit!" he stood up the rest of the way. "If I wanted to hear this tripe I would have gone to shrink, not to a hole in the ground in Africa. You undo this! Now!"  
  
"Or what?" the demon asked.  
  
That silenced Spike. Or what. Seriously. He was a lowly, miserable human. He had things all filled up inside him that could be squished and popped and broken. He wasn't going to do anything but bitch and moan. Still...that was something. "I thought you couldn't even make a vampire human. I thought you had to have the senshi or whatever the hell that is. I thought you had to be a champion and save the righteous from the wicked and go questing and pull a stone out of a rock or something. You just can't go turning vampires into humans at will. There are rules, mate. These drawn out, complicated rules which you just walked all over and frankly, I'm not gonna stand for it. There are people I can call, you know! I have rights!"  
  
"These were extenuating circumstances," the demon replied, clearly unphazed by the threat of civil action. "In the case of the sanshu," the demon corrected. "Humanity is the reward. In this case, it is a demotion. You have proven yourself to be a complete discredit to your race, and no amount of angsty introspection on your part is going to change that. To be bad or not to be bad? Is it true love or is it the chip? Who left the cake out in the rain? No one cares, William. You were of no use to anyone. Not the forces of evil, not the forces of good...so we've taken you off the hook. You're downsized. Retired. You are human now. You will grow old, and you will die, and the world will be rid of you. Now get on with it."  
  
Spike just stood there slack jawed and disbelieving. He was being fired. The demons were letting him go for gross incompetence. He couldn't believe it. Disowned from two races in 250 years. "But..." he started, then realized he had nothing. "I... I might never find that recipe again."  
  
"Get out!!!"  
  
Spike staggered out of the cave and stumbled into the light. The light. He squinted at the sun, taking it in for practically the first time. He somehow thought that should feel more significant somehow, but no. It was just how he remembered it. Round and hot. He sighed as he walked over to the moped he managed to score in the local village. He traded his sunglasses for it. He was beginning to think that was a stupid trade. He took a deep breath and listened to his organs pumping inside him, all working furiously just so he could continue to exist.  
  
Hmmm. Existence. The word had an uncomfortable ring to it all of a sudden. He patted his chest where his heart was. Well, might as well take it for a test spin. If these organs were hell bent on keeping him alive, he suddenly felt hell bent on making it difficult for them.  
  
Spike spent the next six months beating the hell out of himself. Not out of repentance or guilt, mind you. Just for the sheer thrill of it. He had never realized how empty all of his vices had previously been. Drinking now made him sick. Gloriously, feverishly sick where he would wake up in places he never knew he had been and find the numbers of girls he never knew he had met in his back pocket. Smoking filled his lungs with tar, burning his insides with a comforting and quickly familiar pain that proved they were still there. Fights caused him to bleed his own blood, not that which had been borrowed from others, but his own life force. And the adrenaline rush he felt as he threw a punch far out weighed the high of any drug. And he should know, because there were few he hadn't tried. He would look back at these days and not remember sorrow or regret as Angel had felt when he was given a soul. No, he just was amazed he was feeling at all. And he wanted to feel everything.  
  
He existed in a state of constant sensory overload, hyper aware of every chemical reaction and basic reflex his body had. He threw himself head first into everything, and was soon a legend in the African village where he took up residence. He'd challenge anyone to a fight. He'd stick his hand in a basket with an angry cobra for a pack of cigarettes. Some say he once drank a bottle of whiskey and challenged a cheetah to a foot race. He had been eternally youthful for 250 years, and he was determined to leave a pretty corpse.  
  
Problem was, he wasn't all that pretty. He sported a perpetual five o clock shadow no matter what time of day it was, and his hair and grown out into a frizzy, bleached tipped nest on the top of his head. His pupils seemed constantly dilated, and he smelled of alcohol and mud and sweat and iron. Iron was the odor of adrenaline, and even if no one else could sense it, he smelled it on him all the time like musk. It was his favorite drug.  
  
At the time he was approached by the stranger, he was seated by himself in a booth in the local tavern, licking toads. The stranger took the seat across from him and said nothing at first, opting to watch him from underneath his wide brimmed hat. Finally, he said, "I had hoped you'd be different."  
  
Spike stopped mid-lick. "Whuh ooh ya ean?" he asked, tongue still pressed against the sandpapery back of the animal.  
  
"They're all the same," the stranger lamented. "They get their first taste of humanity and they just want to use it up. At the rate you're going, you'll be dead in a month."  
  
Spike released his toad. "So what?" he shrugged. "I had a good run."  
  
"No, you had a long run. There's a difference."  
  
"All right. What are you selling?" Spike asked wearily.  
  
"You're not the first of your kind, you know. There's been many like you. Blips in the system, if you will. They all wind up the same way. Not that it matters much. Even if they die, they move on. It serves the same purpose in the end."  
  
Spike blinked a few times and then took a shot of whiskey. "You gonna explain yourself or you just gonna keep thinking out loud?"  
  
"Look, it's like this. Everyone always hears about ghosts. Ghosts are dead people with unfinished business, right? But what if the body of that ghost gets brought back without it? What if the body gets a second chance but the soul doesn't? Those vampires...they get sort of stuck. They can play the part all right but there's a piece of them that doesn't quite make the transition. They still crave creature comforts like hot wings, for example. Or cigarettes."  
  
Spike looked down at the butt burning in his hand.  
  
"Or love," the stranger added. "Sometimes they get over it and the transformation becomes final. Sometimes they just wander the earth in a state of constant limbo. So we send them back."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Humans are never required to take sides," he said matter of factly, thinking nothing of reaching across the table and downing what was left of Spike's beer. "They're irrelevant, really. The pawns, to trot out the ol' chess cliché. But those of us who are not quite human...well, we must choose. We must have our feet firmly planted on one side or the other because unlike humans, we have the power to change things. When one of us does not, it upsets the balance. Now don't get me wrong. We just don't go around humanifying every demon having a midlife crisis. Doubt is part of the balance too. But there's doubt and then there's what you were."  
  
"Which was?"  
  
"Messed up, basically. You were a situation that proved incapable of rectifying itself. So you wound up here. They all do eventually. And most of them never leave."  
  
Spike took a moment to process all this and then ordered himself another shot of whiskey, which he felt made the processing go smoother. Shot taken, he belched and asked, "So what is your roll in all this?"  
  
"Think of me as a guidance counselor. It's my job to make sure you drop outs make out all right, one way or the other."  
  
"I thought you said most of them ended up dead."  
  
"Well, that's the one way. I was hoping you'd take the other."  
  
"Which is?"  
  
"You realize what an incredible opportunity you've been handed and make the most of your second chance. Demons don't get those every day, and humans never do. So you can either drink yourself into oblivion or for the first time in your life, you can be somebody."  
  
Spike thought about it for a moment and then announced, "I choose oblivion."  
  
The stranger shrugged. "Your funeral, buddy." And with that, he snapped his fingers and he was gone. Spike quickly looked around the bar to see if anyone else had noticed that, but no one was paying any attention. They might not have been able to see anything if they had looked, for all he knew. He sighed as he stared into the bottom of his Collins glass, the liquid magnifying the dead insects and imperfections in the wood to an uncomfortable degree. He glided the make shift lens over his hand, and found his skin was in no better condition. He honestly felt he could see the cells dying, graying and flaking off before his eyes. He could feel his organs giving out, his heart ticking off like a taxi meter to the unknown. He was in his late 20's now. In 60 or so years, he'd be dead. It was practically an instant, at least relatively speaking. He slammed down the empty glass and looked out the window. Perhaps there was something to be said for second chances.  
  
He didn't know where he wanted to end up, but he knew it wasn't here. And he knew at least one other place where he was certain he didn't want to live out his days. But he also knew he had to at least pay a visit. It was where he kept all his stuff.  
  
And just like that, Spike disappeared from Cameroon, with not so much as a farewell or a bar tab paid. His legend would grow throughout the years, the stories becoming more and more preposterous until the locals would speak of the strange man who could out bully a rhinoceros and had a lion for a drinking buddy. But he would always be remembered in the stranger's mind as the one who finally got away.  
  
To be continued.... 


	2. Part 2

It was raining when Spike set foot in Sunnydale a month later. Lying and stealing his way back from Africa took longer than he had hoped. Almost enough time to change his mind. He didn't care for the rain. He went a couple centuries not minding it at all, but now he was cold and he didn't really like the smell of wet leather. He trudged miserably through the graveyard, surprised at how familiar it all still was. A part of him hoped to God or whatever he was supposed to hope to these days that he wouldn't see her. The rest of him tried not to think about it. When he reached his old pad without incident, he gave a sigh of relief and then pushed in the door.  
  
"Who's there?!?" Clem shrieked from somewhere in the corner. "I told you, I'll have the kittens by Sunday," he added for good measure.  
  
"You owe me a hell of a lot more than kittens by the looks of things," Spike replied, gazing around at the shambles surrounding him. He sighed as he realized he was standing in a giant puddle. "Leak?"  
  
"Spike!" Clem shrieked, and the genuine excitement in his voice almost made Spike's heart grow two sizes that day. "How long have you been back?"  
  
"A few hours. Been taking good care of my place, I see." He had barely finished the sentence when his television sparked and popped behind him, waterlogged beyond its means.  
  
"You look different," Clem observed. "Is it the hair? It's the hair! You stopped dying your hair! No, wait. That's not it..." he took a few tentative steps closer before he realized what was different. His hair dye grew out. Dead men's dye jobs don't grow out. Their hair doesn't grow. He was...Clem gasped and took a step back, as if he was afraid. "No," he said.  
  
"Yes," was all Spike could manage in reply. "Long story. Don't really want to get into it."  
  
Clem's fear was instantly and almost jarringly replaced by giddy joy. "Get out! Did you tell Buffy?!?"  
  
"No, and I don't think I'm going to," Spike decided pretty much in that second. "I think I'm just going to get my shit and get out. Do I have any shit, Clem? Is there anything here that hasn't been destroyed?"  
  
"There's some t-shirts, I think, in the dresser. And there's some beer in the fridge, if you want." Spike sighed as he collected what was salvageable and grabbed a six-pack out from the fridge, which wasn't working. It was more like a beer cubby than a functional appliance. "Where are you going to go?" Clem asked.  
  
Spike shrugged. "Don't know. But I'm going to leave in the morning. Hey, Clem. Despite being a spectacular failure as a house sitter...you were a half way decent friend. Thanks and...you know. Stuff," he finished awkwardly. He was surprised to find this sort of thing was even more difficult as a human.  
  
Clem smiled and then leaned in to give what Spike imagined would be a hug, but that was a little more than he was willing to endure, so he took a polite step back and shook his hand. Then he got the hell out of there.  
  
Spike found himself in front of a bar, which seemed to be the one place he always ended up when he had nowhere else to go. He thought he might have drank there before, but to his surprise, he couldn't really remember. It seemed ages ago. Realizing he had no form of ID and that he couldn't properly muscle his way in these days, he opted to slide in through the bathroom window. Despite being alive for the majority of the year, his constant diet of sin and debauchery kept him as lean as ever. In fact, he realized as he picked himself up off the bathroom floor that it was the first time he was seeing his reflection in ages. He still looked pretty much dead. The only noticeable difference was his hair. He attempted to dye it again once in Africa, but it turned out that peroxide burns the hell out of a persons scalp. He shrugged, attempted lamely to control a wayward cowlick, and approached the bar.  
  
"Whiskey up," he ordered, but the bartender seemed unobliging.  
  
"You got a bracelet?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"You need a bracelet. You should have gotten one at the door."  
  
Spike looked around and noticed that many of the bar patrons and strips of brightly colored paper taped around their wrists. Drat, foiled again. Deeming the whole ordeal unworthy of his time and effort, he voluntarily excused himself from the bar and into the back alley. Where of course, there was a young woman about to be snacked upon by a vampire. There were entirely too many alleys in this town. He would have to have a word with the urban development department about that. He was a citizen now. A soon- to-be-registered voter.  
  
Spike sighed as he peeled the fiend off his pray. The vampire was shocked at first, which aided the easy removal. Once a vampire is fixated on food, he can pay attention to little else. But now he was pissed and he wheeled around on the intruder, fangs bared. Spike felt himself instinctively attempt to bare his, before wincing in embarrassment. The vampire got in the first punch.  
  
Spike gasped as he felt the wind knocked out of him, his teeth clamping down on his tongue. He took a moment to spit out blood, his own blood, and noted the glazed look the vampire took on when he smelled it. Spike never forgot what it was like to have that lust, to need something so badly you think you might burst. It was the memory of that feeling that made him almost invincible in a bar fight, and to his surprise, it made him reasonably effective against vampires. After a brief scuffle, Spike, who seemed to know what the vampire would do before he did, managed to wrestle him into a submissive position. He groped around the alley for a moment in search of a sharp object and found one in the form of a discarded doorstop. He raised his arm up for the plunge and then....he stopped.  
  
He couldn't do it. The monster in him knew how to kill but the human side of him knew empathy. He knew what it was like to be on the other side of that stake. He felt a familiar nagging deep in his gut that he thought he might have recognized as hypocrisy. If he killed this vampire, he would be a hypocrite. That never bothered him before, as hypocrisy is a purely human idea. Sure, he'd throw the word around, particularly at Buffy, but he never felt it himself until now. It was a crappy feeling. Defeated, he released his grip on the vampire. "Go," he muttered. The vampire returned to his human form, not quite knowing what to make of the situation. "Go, get out of here!" Spike shooed him as if he were a stray cat that followed him home. "GO!" he screamed, and the vampire finally went. Spike slumped back against the brick wall, wiping a trickle of blood from his own mouth. What the hell was he going to do?  
  
He was a human being with a monster's memories. It was easy to flip flop between allegiances before but now there were all sorts of complex emotions attached to it. A part of him hoped that turning human would wipe the slate clean, that his old life would be deemed invalid. That he'd get a do over. That's what the stranger meant when he said second chance, no? But it wasn't really a second chance. This was just Chance v2.0. All the old software was still there, but with added bugs and security glitches. For the first time since he became a human, he felt utterly depressed. And depressed packs a hell of a wallop when you're of the flesh and blood variety. He looked up and realized he had wandered aimlessly past the schoolyard. He also noticed a rather large commotion going on near the swing set. He recognized it immediately as a good old-fashioned brawl. Well, he had that going for him, which was nice. He took a deep breath and dove head first into the fray, swinging blindly at whoever passed in front of him and relishing every return blow. Physical pain was real, fleeting and uncomplicated. And most of all it distracted him from everything else. He had just delivered a brilliant uppercut to some body part or another when he thought he heard a familiar voice. "Problem here?"  
  
Spike looked up to see Xander Harris standing over him, wielding a stake. Harris's eyes got wide with recognition, only to narrow again to angry slits. The last thing Spike saw was his stabbin' arm reach to the sky in righteous fury. "Bloody hell," he muttered, as he took a stake right to the gut. 


End file.
